COVID-19 affected the entire world. Students and educators lives changed and left them with short and long-term changes to their education. Many kids all had different experiences with online learning, but most were negatively impacted. There are many reasons as to why kids and teachers were negatively affected.
The COVID-19 pandemic affected education by kids having to learn everything through video calls. While it continued education, it also attached everyone to a device, with many students facing challenges due to limited access to strong internet connection. The shift to online learning led to a decline for many kids particularly among younger students and those with special educational needs. Teachers had to adapt to different ways of teaching (often under stress) and not knowing how to control a class virtually. Social isolation, increased screen time, and mental health challenges affected both students and teachers.Despite the challenges, the pandemic’s impact on education also resulted in long-term positive changes. Many educational apps have been improved and created since the pandemic started.
Teachers were hit very hard due to the pandemic and its super fast changes that were coming to them. A healthy work-life balance is very important for teachers mental health and plays a big role when it comes to teaching. Making sure you are maintaining a healthy balance between work and your personal life creates a healthier environment for your students as well. Time management between emails, students who didn’t have access to strong internet and faced issues with their devices and trying to ensure the grades of kids were at a steady pace and weren’t all collapsing was a huge responsibility for teachers. Not only were teachers managing all of the issues faced on a device, but to maintain control over a certain amount of students for hours on end every day over a virtual screen. This brought a huge amount of anxiety and stress to teachers. Especially to those who had just started teaching.
Covid- 19 caused every grade of students to decline academically, but disabled and special education students were severely affected due to this outbreak. Covid-19 led to fully remote learning and extreme isolation from not only teachers, but for so many other things as well. These things being therapy, doctors, specialists, and places where they would need to go for checkups or to make sure they were healthy and assisted. Most kids wouldn’t be able to focus and understand through a screen which led to a major decline in their learning. This also limited their ability for them to get physical movement and exercise because going to a public setting was strictly set to be no contact and 6 feet apart.
In conclusion, this outbreak was a period of time where everyone’s lives changed. We students and teachers have learned new ways to take precautions and protect ourselves from sickness. Although it has benefited us in some ways in the long run, it severely negatively affected students everywhere academically.